Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison (2000)
American environmental/cultural, Rural, Great Lakes/Upper Midwest, Cultural geography, Canadian studies, Comparative regional history, GIS applications

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Office: 3928 Wood Hall
E-mail: lynne.heasley@wmich.edu
Phone: (269) 387-2778

Teaching

I teach a number of introductory and advanced courses in History and Environmental Studies, including American Environmental History, Great Lakes History, Introduction to Environmental Studies, and most recently the senior capstone in Environmental Studies. In addition, I received a grant from the Canadian government to redesign the environmental history survey so that it has a transnational and Great Lakes focus. Beginning summer 2006 I will be part of a team of history faculty developing summer institutes for Michigan middle school teachers as part of a three-year Teaching American History grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Scholarship

My research examines the ways in which humans have shaped and been shaped by their environments, along with changes different cultural groups have undergone in their ideas about the nonhuman world. To date my work has been place-based and regional. Some would call it microhistory because I analyze multiple histories in small places to understand much larger historical patterns and processes. I experiment with combinations of methods that span the social and natural sciences, including geographic information systems (GIS) and participatory research. I also engage land tenure theory by examining the role of socio-environmental mediators like “property” in social and ecological transformation.

My research agenda includes (1) developing a body of scholarship on the Great Lakes region focused on connections between ecological and cultural change; and (2) developing comparative research projects that cross disciplines and geographical regions--e.g., history and ecology, the U.S. and Canada, North America and Africa.

I have recently published a book that traces the evolution of property rights debates through the transformation of a rural landscape in Wisconsin. My next book project will be an environmental history of the Peace Corps entitled The Peace Corps and Ecology.

Publications

Recent Book:

A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

Articles/Book Chapters:

“Walking Contested Land: Doing Environmental History in West Africa and the U.S.,” Environmental History 10:3 (2005), pp. 510-531.

“Shifting Boundaries on a Wisconsin Landscape: Can GIS help Historians Tell a Complicated Story?” Human Ecology 31:2 (2003), pp. 183-211.

“A Tale of Three Townships.” Four part newspaper series plus concluding commentary on the environmental history of southwest Wisconsin (Viroqua, WI: Vernon County Broadcaster, 2001).

"Forest Tenure and Cultural Landscapes: Environmental Histories in the Kickapoo Valley,” Lynne Heasley and Raymond P. Guries, in Who Owns America? Social Conflict Over Property Rights (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 182-207.

"The Politics of Manure: Resource Tenure and the Agropastoral Economy in Southwestern Niger,” Lynne Heasley and James Delehanty, Society and Natural Resources, 9 (1996), pp. 31-46.

Current Book Projects:

 An environmental history of the Peace Corps entitled The Peace Corps and Ecology.

A co-edited anthology with Dr. James Fedlman entitled Great Lakes Environmental History.

Other Professional Activities

I am on the board of directors of Tillers International. Tillers is an internationally respected non-governmental organization (NGO) whose mission promotes sustainable rural development, along with the study and appropriate use of historical skills and technologies. Tillers carries out projects in Africa, South America, and the United States.